I thought you would like to see the results of my hard work and many hours of rendering, and when I say many I mean in some scenes days of continuous rendering on my slow pc. My methods and techinques may not be professional but the ned result is very rewarding to me. There is still some more to add, possibly an enemy ship being destroyed but that is pushing my abilities alot and may take me some time.Let me know what you think;NCC-1701-A mini movie

I really don't like criticizing so I will merely add some observations...

To me, the action is to slow...It is always up to the director, but I feel it takes a very long time for things to happen, but maybe that's just me being impatient...

Also, when the ship passes by, I would have used a combination of moves to make it more... I don't know the word... ...panoramic maybe?

i.e. the ship sweeps from left to right, but the camera is fixed... I would have moved the ship, maybe even making it turn a bit (following an arc) while tracking it with the camera, perhaps even moving the camera alongside, to make the shot more "panoramic" and making the movement and speed of Enterprise more clear.

I really like what your doing with this, limited? software and hope to see more of it

I am always willing to listen to more experienced and talented people and know where your coming from. As for the points you raised I totaly agree with you. Yes the animations are slow but in creating my animations everything was guess work. I didn't know how many frames per second Imagine was going to use and didn't know how to calculate time and distance factors to calculate the speed the enterprise would travel. Another problem I had was in animating the scene, by that I mean all the lights associated with the ship. There are over 42 lights in the scene and I couldn't work out how to move all the lights along the same path so I took a different approach and instead of moving all the lights and the ship the only thing moving in all the scenes are the camera, the space dock and the planet. What I did was create an open path and assigned it to one object then cloned that path and assigned it to the second object and so on.leaving the ship and all her lights stationary. What I was trying to do was simply achieve an end result which I managed in some small part and will try and improve on for my next attempt. Please feel free to chip in witrh any tips you may have as I love doing this stuff. Just to give you some idea of the time my poor old pc (1.6GHz with 2GB of ram) took to render some of these scenes the clip where the enterprise passes by the planet took 24 hours for 4 days, my wife and kids weren't pleased as they could get on the pc during that time and she isn't looking forward to the electric bill either, lol.

I am not an IMAGINE expert by any means, but like you I am a great fan of the "brute force approach". I usually chase an end-result, and try all sorts of tricks to achieve it.

Often, trying to overcoming issues like the ones you mention, is the key to new techniques. These little snippets of pain (experience!) can make all the difference and they can teach you a helluva lot.

My projects usually have similar requirements to yours - lots of lights, lots of objects, lots of movement.

Colin, are you familiar with object grouping?

I mostly build large objects out of lots of separate objects, grouped together. Once grouped together the objects "act" as a single object, but you retain control of an individual objects' attributes.

Grouping objects like this is useful for creating different STATES - different "poses" for the object. IFW is good at animating these object states.

In this way you can create different attributes at the OBJECT level, and different animation STATES at the GROUP level, rather than having to assign colours and attributes to individual faces - which is (let's face it!) a sh*tload of manual work mate!

The downside is that each STATE of an object increases the size of the .OBJ object file, so if disk storage or RAM is a big issue for you, then using states will require some planning and management on your part.

Rendering takes a long time. Are you doing SCANLINE or TRACE rendering? TRACE will take a very long time if you're using lots of lights. Try doing test renders in SCANLINE, and doing only final renders in TRACE mode.

Keep up the good work, and ask any questions - they're a friendly and knowledgeable bunch here...especially our webmaster!

Hum, you give me to much credits when it comes to knowledge, there are many here that are much more knowledgeable about Imagine then me, I am a systems engineer and UNIX admin with some programming skills...

I do like to dabble in Imagine and other 3D softwares though and I created this site as a place for us Imagineers when I felt the info was to "spread out" out there.

But I do like rendering, and I do know a lot about how it is done, and I am dabbling with my own rendering engine (pre stage) and am currently writing some object bending code that hopefully will be done sometime within the next century

Worked to late yesterday and actually forgot to upload the Enterprise model... sorry Colin, I'll try to remember it tonight :/